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After Eaton Fire Response, A Search and Rescue Team Gears Up for a Future of Wildfire
Like many California volunteer rescuers, Sierra Madre Search and Rescue Team members got their start doing wilderness missions. Now, they’re preparing for a bigger role in an era of more frequent, severe wildfires.
When the volunteers on the Sierra Madre Search and Rescue Team look back on the first night’s response to the Eaton Fire, what they remember most is problem-solving, and quickly.
Without enough local paramedics to cover emergency calls, rescue volunteers — each a certified emergency medical technician, said Rob Klusman, a senior team member — went out into the field in teams of two to conduct preliminary medical evaluations and provide basic life support. Too many roads were blocked by debris, so rescuers evacuated people on foot. It became clear that the team needed ears in the 911 dispatch room — “the traditional mechanism of dispatching units was too much…[dispatchers] were just getting slammed,” Klusman explained — so a team member sat next to the operators, creating tickets for radio to the local command post.
“Then we’d translate that into a field assignment, we’d dispatch a response,” Klusman said. SMSR had never put a team member in the dispatch room before — they tried it on the fly, and it worked.
“We were building an airplane while we were flying it,” is how operations leader Carolyn Grumm described it.
For search and rescue teams across the country, their focus on local communities makes them an ideal responder. “We know this community,” Grumm said of the Sierra Madre area. “This is something we can do.”
But it also meant, for the 30 or so SMSR volunteers working that night, putting their own worries aside to respond to the most urgent needs. One team member’s house burned down while he was carrying out rescue operations. Grumm, dispatching team members from the command post on January 7, had to comfort herself that her 80-year-old parents were only a block away. “If anything happened, I could just run and scoop them up,” she remembered reassuring herself.
For Klusman, the vast and urgent need came into focus early that evening, when his team went to check on a medically complex patient receiving end-of-life care. The patient was medically stable but needed to be evacuated from a multi-story building immediately.
“Had the situation gotten worse, that individual would not have been able to get out on their own,” Klusman recalled. His team’s response raised a worrying question: “How many more people do we have like this, in a similar circumstance, who are in this relatively modest geographical area?”
A Grim Aftermath
Klusman couldn’t even count how many people his teammates evacuated that night, or how many dispatches he answered before the emergent phase was over a few days later. Immediately, he and his teammates moved into their second, grimmer assignment: Moving through devastated, burned-out neighborhoods, working with public agency responders, forensic experts, academic anthropologists, and other search and rescue teams to find human remains.
Sierra Madre Search and Rescue Team members help evacuate residents on January 7 as the Eaton Fire approaches. (Photo courtesy of Sierra Madre Search and Rescue Team)
“The magnitude, the amount of the devastation” was astonishing, Klusman recalled. While he’s responded to mudslides and smaller-scale disasters for years, “the forces that are involved [in an Eaton Fire-level disaster] are incomprehensible.”
Searching through the burned-out remnants of backyards and outbuildings reminded him of the urgency he feels when persuading people in the line of fire to evacuate. “Anybody who does not get out and is caught in that situation, there’s very little left of a person,” he said sadly. “I don’t think people realize that…Staying behind is not going to be worth their life.”
Several times, Klusman’s team identified potential human remains, alerting the forensics workers to bring trained cadaver dogs in for confirmation. “Once that process happens, we move on. The ground crews move on,” he said. Leaving behind such devastation was difficult, he explained, but the important thing was covering ground as thoroughly and efficiently as possible: “Regardless of the outcome, if we can locate somebody’s loved one…it helps with closure, even if the outcome was not what we would like.”
Hyper-Local Expertise
During conversations with Direct Relief, SMSR was gearing up for the threat of mudslides — an ever-present risk after wildfires in California. Most immediately, Klusman said, team members are considering “what do we need to think about in a post-fire world right now?”
But on a larger scale, he explained, California search and rescue teams are thinking about the escalating severity and frequency of wildfires — and how they can be there to respond.
For Klusman and his teammates, extensive local knowledge and years of experience give an indispensable advantage. “You can’t just come in and do it for a little while. It takes a long time” to learn both local geography and community needs, he said.
Oftentimes, the information that comes in during an emergency is sketchy, even unreliable — and it’s a rescuer’s knowledge of the terrain and experience with similar responses that will help guide their decision-making.
In the aftermath of the Eaton Fire, search and rescue volunteers joined public agency responders and anthropologists to search burned-out neighborhoods for human remains. (Photo courtesy of Sierra Madre Search and Rescue Team)
Teammates, Not Heroes
For search and rescue volunteers, the wilderness-based missions that once made up the bulk of their early work may give some ground to new needs in an era of intense wildfire threats.
“We may need to respond to a mix of incidents that haven’t always been our norm,” Klusman said. “We’ve always been needed, and we’ve always recognized that.”
When search and rescue teams decide how — and whether — to respond, he said the most important questions are, “Do we add value? What do we need to do to be the most valuable resource we can be?” Now, the question is, “What role do we play in bigger disasters?”
Reviewing and analyzing their response to the Eaton Fire, SMSR volunteers noted that “we did not have sufficient equipment to cover all the needs we had,” Klusman recalled. “We had to field so many people, in so many different areas, that we were pressed to equip everyone.” Some of their equipment was damaged during their rescue work.
Direct Relief provided a $25,000 emergency grant to Sierra Madre Search and Rescue Team, in addition to field medic packs and requested protective equipment, to meet their increased operating costs.
As the need grows, SMSR’s team will need to expand. But choosing new volunteers carefully is crucial, Klusman said. A potential teammate who’s motivated by personal glory, rather than a desire to serve others, is most likely not a good fit.
“Search and rescue is a team sport,” he explained. “This is not individuals being heroes…It is a structure that allows for individuals, or groups of individuals, to be in the right place and the right time, to make a difference at the right time.”
He’s concerned, too, about attrition. The urgency and danger of wildfire rescue work, and the anguish of finding human remains, take their toll on volunteers. However, for the right person, “it’s incredibly rewarding.” Klusman said. “How do you bring people to the table who will understand what this means?”
Still, Grumm said, the volunteers who do this work are virtually always highly motivated. “We’re setting up for future events,” she said. “Everyone steps up in ways that aren’t their primary role.”
When she was interviewed for a volunteer role at SMSR, Grumm remembered, the interviewers asked her why she wanted to join the team. She explained that she loved the wilderness, loved a challenge, and wanted to help her community. While she was pleased with her answer, she quickly realized most of the people accepted to the team give a similar response. It’s an indication, ultimately, that they’re like-minded people: Everyone is there to serve.
“This is the way we can help our community,” she said.
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